


Wistful Thinking

by DROLLmaeosaur



Category: Magic: The Gathering
Genre: Agents of Artifice, Alcohol and Its Effects, F/F, Flippant Treatment of Elves Without Appology, Innistrad, Interim: Shadows Over Innistrad and Kaladesh, Kaladesh, Liliana Snark, M/M, Minor Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-07
Updated: 2017-01-07
Packaged: 2018-09-15 11:19:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,389
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9232658
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DROLLmaeosaur/pseuds/DROLLmaeosaur
Summary: “To probe the wonders of the multiverse, to gaze upon worlds unspoiled by blade or spell… it’s enough to make one weep for the possibilities denied.”The reappearance of a too-familiar face doesn't usually end well.





	

They’re all of them at a tavern in the ass end of Thraben of all places when it happens. Surely there’s something poetically ironic about that. Maybe more pathetically ironic is the fact that they are there to celebrate the so-recent success that so very nearly eluded them.

Hence the emphasis on ass-end of Thraben. Any place bigger than this isolated, backwater hamlet would know them. Even with a change of clothing for each and a very explicit (if begrudging) promise from Chandra not to set any fires that would cause damage to person or property. Why it was so important to get them out together that she’d make such a bargain Jace wasn’t entirely sure - but her enthusiasm was infectious. And undeniable.

Gideon had caved after only a cursory protest, as he did with all of Chandra’s non-sequitur epiphanies. Jace himself was too tired to debate her exuberance but moreover, he’d have been lying if he’d tried to tell them the thought of warm food and a tankard of something alcoholic in a place where no one knew him didn’t appeal to a man with an ever-expanding list of responsibilities.

Tamiyo’s easy and cheerful acceptance was a bit of a surprise, maybe even concerning, since she seemed almost childishly enamored of the concept of Innistrad’s foreign, foaming “bread drinks” but no one was willing to dampen her mood once her eerie, furtive silence began to finally lift.

Nissa was simply happy to have them all together and whole after whatever passed for victory against such a foe as they had faced.

As always the dark horse of the hour was Liliana. Of course she’d made her pledge and taken the oath and arguably saved, not only their plucky cadre but the entire plane, from a preordained demise. Jace wouldn’t pretend that he was world-weary and jaded enough not to have known that she would in the end. But the idea that she would deign to descend to their level and brush elbows with them in celebration wasn’t easy to process.That was more than Jace would admit that he’d held out hope for. He’d done the laughing and the drinking and the late night revelry with Liliana before and he couldn’t reconcile the past with the current image of the woman.

He would only imagine how the rest viewed the prospect. Prying into the thoughts of one’s compatriots and soon-to-be drinking partners hardly seemed politic.

For her part she was characteristically disinterested. Much the same as she’d been when he’d first went in search of her help. The same mask of casual cruelty and dark humor artfully slung to mimic carelessness. Jace was already preparing excuses for her to mollify them when she inevitably left with only a biting line of farewell.

“I suppose I could manage a drink or two.” She said with a breathy resignation that meant nothing of the sort.

Jace was so shocked the retort, “I’ve seen you handedly manage 12 and demand another round besides…” died unsaid. The rest looked equally surprised in each their own way. Save for Chandra, who looked almost as giddy as a schoolgirl who’s crush had just acknowledged her.

Precisely as giddy as a schoolgirl who’s crush had just acknowledged her.

Well, that at least explained why the Firebrand had been willing to go so far as promising such good behavior in exchange for getting them all together.  If he had any other commentary on this recent revelation, watching Chandra beam with guileless excitement up at the beautiful and terrifying object of her new affection, he kept it to himself.

After all, who was he to judge?

And knowing Liliana’s proclivities, Chandra may just get what she was after - if indeed she was after more than more than a friendly night of drunken camaraderie. Or knew what she was after at all.

Jace found himself smiling helplessly. It was charming, in an odd way, to see it from the outside. It set the evening in a new light, and the prospect of watching this familiar pageantry unfold over the night’s libations was exactly the kind of removed, slightly self-deprecating amusement that appealed to his current exhausted contentment.

They selected the tavern and the time, then broke apart to finish whatever small business remained to them.

It was quicker than it should have been, maybe, considering the near ubiquitous desolation that had only just been subverted. But not a one of them wanted much to do with the aftermath. They seemed to have all come to the same conclusion. Whether due to exhaustion, apathy or irresponsibility the unspoken decision seemed to be to leave the rebuilding to Sorin’s, still somehow, ever-flowing coffers. In truth the harried patriarch likely wouldn’t have it any other way. All for the best that the interlopers be quickly on their way.

For Jace, yet another shopping trip was in order - to replace the now-recognizable coat with something as unrecognizable as it had been at the outset. Hopefully something that would provoke less snide commentary from Liliana, but he doubted such a garment truly existed anywhere in the multiverse that would prove immune to her ire. Much less once he was the one wearing it.

Tamiyo seemed just as impossibly charmed by this mundane task as she did anything else new or colloquial and when she caught his arm with a delicate politeness to ask if she might accompany him he could hardly be so cruel as to wave her off. He didn’t much want to anyway. Even if he was in any way adverse to her company (he wasn’t) he half guessed that she’d show up to their tavern dressed in some garish costume piece that caught her eye in a theatre window. Best she had a bit of guidance.

Jace wasn’t really one to judge anyone else’s choice of fashion, but at least he could glimpse into the shop girl’s thoughts for an idea if nothing came organically to mind.

They went, Jace more than content to listen to Tamiyo’s uncharacteristically rapid chatter about the odd little details that grabbed at her attention. This included the newly-illusioned pale pink of her fingers. She’d enthusiastically agreed to his offer of a human guise for the night. He would have simply used a spell to alter their clothing as well if he wasn’t positive that Chandra was going to force more drinks into him than was healthy over the next few hours. Taking a chance on keeping up multiple mirages while intoxicated seemed… ill advised. And Tamiyo was as willing to pull him through tailor’s racks as she was anything in her current, curious state.

The fruits of their shopping labors were easily won, surprisingly, their choices simple by the necessity of having to limit themselves to ready-made outfits.Tamiyo now wore a simple dress of flowing cotton and linen in a pale shade of blue that nonetheless complimented her newly-darkened hair and eyes. Jace himself was out of blue entirely, which certainly felt odd, but it was insanity to think that he’d be able to find a jacket, shirt and trousers in shameless blue sitting about awaiting his purchase. Blacks and greys would suffice for the night.

“FINALLY! What took you two so long?”

Chandra, completely unsurprisingly, already has a flagon in her hand when Tamiyo and Jace arrive. Gideon is seated across the table from her, but easily reaches to shove her in playful warning when her eyebrows raise and her mouth opens again to no doubt suggest some lewd reason for their delayed arrival. Judging by the smirk and the waggle of her eyebrows.

Instead a cool, drawling voice inserts itself, carrying somehow in the relative chaos of the crowded taproom around them. “It probably just took poor Tamiyo that long to fight Jace for that dress she’s wearing.”

And by every doubt and insane happening this world could still offer she’s actually here. Liliana is staring at him from across the room, chin perched on her folded hands, sitting next to Chandra with a look just as childishly accusatory as her companion’s.

He doesn’t bother to hide his surprise. Even if she hadn’t already guessed that he’d doubted her follow-through, which she obviously had, there wasn’t much he could hide from her. As with most everything else involving the woman, it was best simply to roll with the punches and enjoy her good mood. They both deserved that much.

Chandra has already recovered from having her quip stolen from her and shoves a tankard like her own into Tamiyo’s hands as the two of them settle into seats at the massive oak table. “As promised!”

A fair slosh of foam and ale froths over onto Tamiyo’s hands in Chandra’s exuberance, whether do to her general good mood or the fact that she may have already drained several herself. Had it really taken them that long to get here? The other three had obviously acquired new clothing somewhere along the way here as well. Chandra’s shift from bright reds to muted burgundies and russets and the fact that Gideon’s pauldrons were no long threatening to poke out his eyes were hard not to notice.

Jace pulled himself out of his thoughts at Tamiyo’s delighted giggles. She set her drink down with a heavy thump.

“It does! It does taste just like bre-bread!” She hiccupped through her commentary. From the unsuspected effervescence of the beverage rather than inebriation… thought Jace doubted any one of them would make it through the night without more hiccups to come.

He was jarred out of his foresight by another of the heavy drinks careening over the table top in his direction. It coursed through on one of the spilled puddles from Tamiyo’s and caught speed in a hydroplaning spin. He caught it but just barely, and of course soaked his hands in the process. There was the distinct klink of coins on the table top and he looked up to see Chandra sliding a handful of low change to Liliana.

His face must have spoke enough because she explained simply: “Chandra bet against you catching that.”

Liliana smiled as she watched his eyes shift in exasperated accusation to the red head and back again.

“I don’t know what’s worse, that she bet against me or that you were the one to bet in my favor.”

A hand came up to her throat in a comically deliberate show of mock outrage. “Someone had to champion your virtue among such unanimous descent Jace.”

Once again he was about to ask but she caught the thread of the question on his face. Her hand came down in a snap of well manicured fingers. “On that note, you owe me too Hercules.”

Jace leveled an unabashed stare at Gideon who at least had the decency to look sheepish as he handed Liliana his portion.

All three were saved from any further scolding when Tamiyo burst into a fit of giggles at his side. Then proceeded to, with a swiftness that could only be called skill, raise her own drink and down it. She thunked the empty tankard onto the table with force.

“I wish to try next!”

There was simply no way to stay angry at anyone after the resultant bout of laughter.

The night continued in much the same way after that precedent. The tavern didn’t have much of a selection of drinks, but what the barkeep did have was abundant and free-flowing. After a few rounds of ale and lagers Liliana was even able to charm a bottle of something dry and red that ‘she could suffer her pallet.’ None of them paid much attention to the other tavern patrons, of which there were a fair many, it seemed this place was the only game in town so to speak. Despite the din they caused amongst themselves they were never bothered by anyone but the shrewd barkeep who didn’t seem to care what they did provided that the coins kept falling into his offered palms.

Every so often someone would glance at the door when it creaked opened, since they were still waiting on their wayward sixth member, but the frequency tapered off after a while. Perhaps she’d found more pressing business? More likely they were all growing fastly too intoxicated to be overly concerned. It wasn’t as if she’d encounter anything dangerous. The only thing that could have proved hazardous to any of them had been dealt with. Obviously. It made perfect alcohol saturated logic.

And they were all well on the way to becoming burgeoning philosophers.

With the exception of perhaps Liliana.

Everyone else at the round table seemed to be completely unable to process her seeming sobriety. Jace, by long standing and hard-won experience knew better. He’d seen her maintain her calm recalcitrance well past the point that her drinking should have incapacitated men three times her size. But, unlike their new companions, he’d also seen her the morning after. The image of Liliana with her hair in tangled disarray and eyes darkened from a night absent fitful sleep rather than artfully applied make-up wasn’t one he’d forget. Neither was the pain of the boot that hit him in the head when she’d thrown it at him and threatened death in nine ways if he bothered her again before the morning was through. It went in stages.

It was that, as much as anything else about the woman who near-literally wrote the book on ‘Don’t ruin this for me, Jace’, that kept him in his in his seat and quiescent. She rose on uncannily steady feet in wicked-heeled boots, walked the twenty feet to an unmarked door at the back of the tap room before turning and curling a beckoning finger back towards her quarry for the night.

Chandra was a red blur in her efforts to follow: just as quick as she was when sober, if not as dexterous.

They were both drunk. But not so much they’d regret this in morning. Or ever. Did Liliana really have it in her to regret anything? Besides, the fact that Chandra had been trying to get herself into Liliana’s lap for the better part of since they’d gotten here was just another reason for him not to bother interfering.

Along with, of course, the fact that he liked all of his limbs attached and unburnt. The lazy, sleepy contentment his own particular brand of drunkenness was fostering in him was a good reason too.

So much so he was about to ask Gideon to go and right he chair that Chandra had knocked down in her haste, before he realized that the man was face-down asleep on the table beside him. He offers the chair one more glance, salutes it for its goodly done duty before completely surrendering the idea of setting it back. It was a good soldier. It died as it lived. It probably would have wanted it this way.

He turns to his other side, hoping that he doesn’t need to shoulder Tamiyo up to one of the tavern’s rooms and keep watch over her while she sleeps off whatever version of drunk soratami turn out to be. Personally he doesn’t think he can manage it. Personally, honestly, he’s not sure if he could quite manage it sober.

Unlike Gideon she was not face down on the table. Far from it. And Jace was too smack-happy at having narrowly avoided a moderate bout of physical exercise to contemplate how she managed such a feat. She had at least as many drinks as both himself and Gideon put together. They’d both gotten oddly silent, and he hadn’t cared to note the difference since the show happening across the table had caught his attention in a vice-grip.

It may have been some time since any kind of carnal pursuit had registered on his growing laundry list of concerns, but he wasn’t dead. And even if the women in question were terrifying and far more likely to inflict him harm as invite him along, Jace could dissociate from reality with the best of them. It was a personal specialty.

“It’s odd isn’t it, the way things come together?” Tamiyo says next to him. She must be at least slightly intoxicated, and by the fucking eternities she damn well should be, because she continues without seeming to care much if he’s listening. “Do you think they would have met otherwise?”

Even now he knows what she’s referring to. It doesn’t help him one bit to answer though.

“D’unno.” He’s a bit too proud of how little he slurs. “Who can say?” He adds the latter bit with perfect, enunciated cadence just to prove he can.

“Exactly. There’s no way to know. The possibilities are infinite after all.”

He doesn’t respond to that. He can see the depth in her eyes, feels the somberness leaching almost like sickness over to him. It brings sobriety with it in the pauses that she lets fill with silence but he’s not sure that’s what he wants.

Jace grabs at the nearest tankard still looking to be full, or fullish at least, as a precaution. This is the same Tamiyo that left the beach with them after the titan had been sealed into the sky. The one they’d all been more than happy to see replaced by the girlish innocent who would, unknown to them at the time, drink them all under the huge oaken table at Chandra’s tavern outing.

“That’s what the eternities are, aren’t they? Possibilities?” This brooding Tamiyo muses.

He doesn’t want to think about eternities, blinding or otherwise, but she keeps going.

“Can something every truly be gone, then?”

He doesn’t know what to tell her. He doesn’t know if a monster god born of whatever whirling maelstrom chaos exists between the planes can be permanently sealed or killed or dealt with. Not really. Maybe Ugin knew but of course the dragon had been less than helpful when he’d tried that avenue of inquiry. Liliana would likely have better answers than him. She knew more of death, mortal death at least, than all of them put together.

"What if everything lost to the eternities just… shows back up one day somewhere else? Because, technically, it all could, couldn’t it?”

And isn’t that just a fucking question...

Jace is saved from having to answer when, finally, her eyes focus back onto whatever present they have. The door to the tavern is opening again. It’s late, or is it early, but it the other drinkers around them don’t seem to think new additions are odd yet at this hour so it can’t be completely obscene. There’s been a few people coming and going every so often. Or maybe it’s just Chandra and Liliana coming back through a different door in a drunken and completely useless attempt to disguise what they were getting up to when they left.

It isn’t.

It’s Nissa. Late and sober and long since having missed the real party.

Jace raises a hand to flag her over, whatever her reasons for the hour he’s not going to let her miss them. At any rate her arrival might distract Tamiyo from her sudden onset of doom and gloom.

He isn’t fast enough, or she didn’t see him because she stops at a different table instead to strike up a confidently casual conversation with one of the other men in the bar. She’s caught Tamiyo’s attention now and the soratami looks puzzled.

“Does she know him?”

Jace laughs softly. As much because Tamiyo’s finally off of the eldrazi talk as because of Nissa’s antics. “I doubt it. She probably just mistook him for me or Gideon, she’s always going on about how all humans look the same and we’ve all got different clothes now.”

No other reason he can think of that she would be making fast friends with strangers in a backwater bar.

“Ah. She must think it’s me.” He raises the mostly-full tankard he’d grabbed to point at their elf compatriot across the room and the man she’s just tapped on the shoulder. “Our hair is similar enough-”

When the man turns to Nissa, Jace drops the tankard. It’s hits the floor not with the satisfying shatter of glass but with a heavy thud and the sloping, spilling sounds of its contents.

Because Nissa’s not wrong. The man at the table, across a yokel tavern in the ass-end of Thraben, looks like Jace. Not perfectly like Jace. Not like an exact reflection in a well-lit mirror. But an approximation that is uncanny. An, only-slightly, rippling image in otherwise placid and smooth water.

Jace knows it’s not actually Kallist.

Knows it can’t actually be Kallist.

In the same way that he knows that certainty won’t make this any easier.

Because he’s weak, and desperate and still raw from a wound never given time or proper reflection to heal. Shut instead in a box in his mind that he was never strong enough to open for fear of being sucked inside it and consumed. But more than that, because he has always been the kind of addict to crave exactly the kind of high that will destroy him on the come-down.

Because that’s exactly what he deserves.

He’s out of his chair before Tamiyo can comment on his dropped mug. Quickly. But this is not Chandra’s careless scramble after Liliana. Jace’s chair scrapes back exactly as far as it needs to for him to stand. Precise. Left there neatly as an after image of his departure. Jace walks to the bar where the publican stands and he man looks as though he too is about to comment on the mess that Jace abandoned thoughtlessly on the floor. Jace fishes out enough coinage to keep him silent.

“Sorry.” He says, not looking or sounding it at all, but that’s what the money’s for. “Can I get another?”

Jace glances back to where Nissa is still talking to him. He’s smiling at the pretty mistaken elf, who he’s probably corrected by now, in a way that makes Jace’s blood go simultaneously ice cold and scalding hot in his veins.

“Two actually.” He indicates to the man at the bar, raising two fingers in confirmation rather than bothering to actually look back at him.

If the barkeep is annoyed by his manner he doesn’t comment. There’s a collection of noises behind him Jace is only barely hearing. He finally turns back, slightly, to the man when he registered the sound of two full tankards set down on the bar. It’s more a drop of one shoulder than a turn, enough to suggest he’s actually looking for answer to his question. Not just musing idly. But his eyes never stray from the man across the bar.

“Who is that?”

“Bothering that girl is he? She another one of your friends?” The barman sighs but his voice has a warm kind of humor to it, flavored with the exasperation of a conversation many-times had. “Bit of a letch that one, but he’ll leave off if she’s not interested. I wouldn’t try to start anything with him over her though, that sword’a his isn’t there for show.”

The man goes onto offer a bit more gossip.

He’s a local, rents a few rooms above a seamstress down the road, but gone as much as he’s in town. Some kind of hunter for contract, though he’s just as well-known for spending his money as he is making it.

Jace latches onto one facet in particular.

His name here, now, is Callen Roarke.

The way the bar keep speaks with a wet, lazy sibilance running between the two names and a confused “euh?” at the end to confirm who Jace is asking after makes his heart stop.

He didn’t need the confirmation.

The sounds are ringing between his ears are there nonetheless.

“Thanks.” Jace offers and he only barely manages that abrupt courtesy before taking his drinks together in one hand. The barkeep starts to say something behind him, something that sounds like it begins with “Wait-” and ends with nothing Jace wants to hear or would listen to.

When he crosses the taproom his boot splashes through the mess he’d made on the floor, tracks it over with him to the table. It makes enough of a sound that Nissa, long ears careless bared to anyone’s view, hears him coming and turns. Her cheeks are flushed and Jace knows it’s not from the bite of the temperate evening outside because she’s wearing the smile to match. Charmed and bright.

A sudden lurch inside him and a dark part of him wants to wipe it off of her face.

He swallows it down quickly.

Not quite quickly enough though, he realizes some of it must have shown through on his face because Kallis- Callen’s weight has shifted in his chair and his right hand is no longer carelessly splayed across the table top.

Of course he would jump to her defense.

Nissa’s blissful unawareness works in his favor this time.

“Jace! There you are. I almost thought this was the wrong place.” She goes on. “Is everyone else here? I’m glad I’ve finally found you, this is-”

“Callen, I‘ve heard.” Jace interrupts and the name feels just almost right in his mouth. A taste of a meal for a starving man.

The darkness must still be in his eyes because he can see Callen relax his sword-hand. He’s moved to a different set of assumptions, but still the wrong conclusion.

“Sorry. Wasn’t trying to get in the middle of anything. Just talking with the lovely lady here. She looked a bit lost.”

The only reason Jace doesn’t interrupt him too is because his throat goes dry and his lungs forget how to breath.

The accent is wrong but the voice is his.

“You aren’t-” Jace and Nissa start speaking at the same time.

Jace recovers faster, perhaps his because his mind is already spinning faster than she could ever keep up to. He puts his free hand on Nissa’s shoulder that’s nearest to him - not the opposite one where he could reach around and pull her into him.

“You're not interrupting anything.” Jace clarifies, emphasizing the right words for understanding and his eye’s meet Callen’s.

After everything else he is expecting to see the similarity there. It still doesn’t help him process it any.

Nissa, he knows, must have turned to look at him because Callen’s eyes track the path of her focus before meeting his.

Jace smiles, just enough, and the beginning of understanding blooms on Callen’s features.

Nissa hasn’t yet gotten there, but Jace is more than willing to help her along. He offers her his other hand - one of the drinks he holds. When she takes one with a confused look up at him he turns his head in the direction of the table where Tamiyo sits, looking on confused but enraptured.

“That’s Tamiyo over there.” He explains when Nissa’s brows furrow, lacking recognition since Jace’s glamour still cloaks their companion scholar’s true appearance.

But the soratami’s dark haired, dark eyed, pale skinned disguise smiles and waves and Jace has never been more grateful for anything.

Obvious cosmic gifts notwithstanding, clearly.

The elf’s nimble fingers slowly fold around the offered beverage. She still looks skeptical. Of course she does.

“Jace…” She starts hesitantly and slow. Like he’s one of the skittish animals that she alone, with her mastery of all things natural and good, can reach out to calm when their hackles are up and their teeth are barred. “Are you…?”

She saves him having to interrupt her a second time by letting her voice fade off into insinuation that matches the upward draw of her brows. He doesn’t have the mental capacity at current to guess or care what mood she thinks he’s in.

“Drunk?” He supplies in offer. The little smile that had started on his face grows in a purposefully crooked exaggeration. “Enough.”

Is he? He has no idea if that’s true or not. He certainly feels drunk on something, but he’s positive it has nothing to do with the alcohol anymore.

He takes his hand back from her shoulder, straightening at the elbow before he lets go. He doesn’t push her away. But he isn’t subtle about taking his own step back. Closer to Callen. “I’ll be fine. This one isn’t even for me.” Jace raises the second of the two drinks in explanation before he holds it out to Callen.

The man takes the drink and seems equally as willing to take Jace’s lead where the lack of subtlety is concerned. “Don’t worry darling, I’ll take good care of your friend here.”

Jace nods at Callen. He doesn’t look away even if he is addressing Nissa. “He did say that he was looking a drink and a bit of conversation…”

That was what Callen had said he’d been after earlier. Exactly what he’d said. To Nissa. When Jace had been across the bar. It was possible he’d unconsciously plucked it from her mind: crossing a line he wouldn’t have normally.

This wasn’t the kind of situation that called for normalcy.

Nissa’s voice has gotten quiet, reserved, but she doesn’t hide the confusion or the worry as her eyes dart between them. “But I’m not…”

Jace is more than willing to start interrupting her again. “Exactly. Look, Tamiyo’s calling.”

He doesn’t usher her way with a waving hand gesture of a dismissal, but it’s a near thing.

Eventually she turns and leaves them alone at Callen’s table.

If there were other people there, either friends of his or other patrons who had just been occupying the space, they’ve since cleared out too.

The pair of them watch her go. To her credit, or perhaps it spoke to how curt he’d been to her, she didn’t look back until she’s sat beside Tamiyo and gestured back in their direction. They both wait for a beat. A breath. A heartbeat, maybe on Callen’s side. Jace still isn’t sure if his has been able to manage any sort of proper rhythm. Neither of them take any further action.

As with the spilled ale and the barkeep, as long as Callen is still here, Jace can’t find it in him to care.

Especially not when Callen kicks out a chair and gestures with a finger for him to take a seat.

Jace doesn’t need to be told twice. He takes the offered seat in the space of time it takes for the other man to take a drink.

“Well…” Callen sets the tankard down onto the table. “That was perhaps the boldest way someone’s ever tried to get my attention in a while.”

“I find that hard to believe.” Jace’s eyes drop to where they both know Callen’s sword is at his hip, even if it’s mostly hidden underneath the table from their angle.

Callen laughs and shrugs as he amends his earlier statement. “The boldest proposition I’ve gotten in a while then.”

“Proposition?”

Callen draws his brows down slightly, but his smile didn’t falter. “That’s what this is, isn’t it?”

Jace hopes that it’s optimism in Callen’s voice. The thought of looking into the man’s mind to confirm doesn’t even cross his own. Without Nissa’s presence to serve as a point of reference, it’s hard not to fall into the same habits he’d stuck to around Kallist.

As such he can feel his face flush and his eyes drop to the floor for a moment before he realizes what he’s done and corrects it.

“Well, I…”

“Don’t stop now. You were doing so well.”

The encroaching embarrassment on Jace’s face morphs like quicksilver into surprise. Willingly, and pleased.

“A man could get used to being fought over like that.” Callen explains. It doesn’t even cross Jace’s mind to correct him, he doubts Nissa was actually interested in him. But Jace would rather listen to the man talk. Particularly when he leans forward in a way that’s both intimate and conspiratorial. “We can tell her to come back and I’ll drop her a few lines if it’ll get you back to the way you were just now.”

Callen gestures a hand in Nissa’s direction across the taproom, even though neither of them moves to shift their focus from one another. His grin is positively roguish now. “Hell - we can bring her with if you’re into that sort of thing.”

The suggestion hits him, but not in either of the ways Callen was probably expecting. He wasn’t arouse or intrigued, nor was he dissuaded or disgusted. But as with everything else racking up on the growing list - the action hits too close in Jace’s memory to the suggestion another man had made involving Jace and another woman.

He catches himself just before his eyes wander back to the door she left through earlier.

It might have less to do with Jace’s self control, since whatever he had of it evaporated once he’d seen Kallist’s face on a man across the bar, and more to do with the magnetic pull he has to him.

“What if I just wanted to talk?”

Callen laughs. “Then I guess we can talk, if that’s what you want.”

* * *

They don’t do much talking.

Not at the bar and not on their way back to room Callen is renting in town.

It's not a long walk and Jace is increasingly thankful for whatever twist of fortune continues to sketch his path. Callen hasn’t even touched him and he’s alight. Well, not since he’d grabbed Jace’s arm to pull him up from the table and out of the bar, but even that small brush of fingers against his his skin was enough. Callen’s calloused thumb had brushed exactly down the valley between the tendons of his wrist.

It hadn’t been on purpose, just a chance of circumstance, but the brush against the pulse point there drew the entirety of Jace’s over-blown focus. Now he could feel his pulse throughout his entire body: flowing, electric and alive. As if he’d forgotten that last fact for a lifetime.

Hadn’t he, though?

If the night is cold, Jace likewise doesn’t feel it. When his breath puffs in front of him the only higher observation his brain can supply is the way his exhale obscures the profile of the man he walks with. Jace tries to breath less, but of course that’s impossible. It’s not the brisk pace of their steps that has him breathless, but he is ever short of air all the same.

He trusts that Callen knows where he is leading them so implicitly the danger of such a thing doesn’t even hit his consciousness. Multiplicitous and barely understood thing that it is, he may have finally met his match.

When the man steers them towards a building, opens a door and leads him in (with a hand on his shoulder that nearly brings Jace to his knees over the threshold) he follows. Jace didn’t see a key but he isn’t paying any attention. His higher brain functions are working only with what they can. If he’d been keen enough to see Callen break them into a house he’d hardly have cared.

Callen doesn’t have to break them into a house, of course. They’ve arrived. Or close enough to it. When he wheels Jace around and presses him bodily into the wall, Jace barely even remembers his own name.

They’re so close, but not close enough. Callen draws within a literal breath of kissing him - but instead twists his mouth down to the flesh at the crook of Jace’s neck. The new shirt he’d purchased with Tamiyo is a common one, with the loose collar of a working man. Callen’s mouth connects there instead. He isn’t biting - not yet.

“What do you want?”

When he speaks Jace can feel the smooth press of his teeth against his neck between each of his words.

Too many things.

Everything: A night. A morning. A second chance.

Absolution. Answers-

“Anything” is Jace’s response and he feels as though he’s never spoken a truer word.

Callen huffs out a laugh that’s become a growl by the time it leaves his lips into Jace’s skin. His hand that had been further working open Jace’s collar pauses enough to change it’s direction and instead catches Jace’s jaw. Pulls his face up to meet his own - the fraction of a few inches that’s different between their height.

Jace’s world spins but centers once again on the man before him. Of course it does.

And then they’re properly kissing and rutting against each other in the dim hallway like much younger men. Just like a younger Jace has done before.

“Ahem.”

And for a moment the voice is Liliana’s and she’s standing there with her hands on her cocked hips because she’s had a long night and all she wants to do is get the hell back into her apartment and the last thing she has patience for is two horny idiots who can’t even keep their collective selves in their pants until they can get into a bed.

Another ‘ahem’ and the voice becomes too raspy, too old for Liliana and Jace tears his focus away from the man he’s all but attached to. He blinks in her direction.

“Ah.. Evening Ms. Withersby. We’ll just be getting off then - up then.” Callen says and he chuckles over his corrections.

She looks nothing like Liliana either. She’s slouched and doughy and her hair is more grey than the mousy brown it might have once been. Jace doesn’t even have the audacity to blush, at least not any more than he is already, much less apologize.

Callen does that for them both of them before he cuts his losses and pulls Jace along into retreat up the stairs. They stumble up the wooden steps, for reasons that have long since stopped having the slightest bit to do with the alcohol they’ve been drinking. He fumbles a little more with the key to his proper rooms before Jace gives him the slightest bit of personal space in which to work.

Once he’s got it clicked open and they’re both successfully behind a closed door, Callen laughs again. It bubbles uncontrollably up his throat and out from behind his lips. He closes the distance that has opened between them in the process of getting into the room and snakes his arms around Jace’s waist. Presses himself flush against his back.

He finally bites, not nearly hard enough, but his teeth drag along the nape of Jace’s neck. Promises enough to leave his hair standing on edge, among other things. At least now Jace can feel the insistent hardness trapped between them and push back against what he knows to be the culprit.

It turns Callen’s laughter into another guttural rumble.

“You’re going to be the death of me, you know that?”

That rips Jace out of the whirling cloud of euphoria. Without warning or pretense.

The truth of the stinging words nearly crashes him back to earth from the sky he’s been dancing through since he first saw him. But, because the multiverse perhaps does spin upon itself and truly does circle back to offer second chances to the damned and unworthy, this man is there to catch him when he falls.

Callen steers him to the bed and kisses his mouth open into breathless cries instead of the threatened sobs. He doesn’t ask him questions. And it’s just as well. Jace doesn’t want to talk, he’d rather use his mouth for other things.

Maybe even more than that he’d rather listen to the man above him.

If he felt used it was because he wanted to be. He only made enough sound to encourage - to coax Callen not just to enjoy himself, but to take. He would gladly admit that he’s been ruined… But if that’s true, than what words could he possibly use to describe the shambles that he’d been before?

It doesn’t matter what he was before. Only this matters.

And it might be the best night of his life.

* * *

“Jace better have just had the worst night of his life.” Liliana says into her coffee, with enough malice to curdle any she cream might have put in it. Good thing she’d given up on sweetening her coffee about seventy odd years ago.

She takes a long drink and holds the steaming mug underneath her face for a longer time still, but the vice around her head refuses to loosen. She doesn’t even want to risk putting her hands on her face. Because the contact might make the room spin again or worse, she’d confirm how puffy and unsightly she already suspected the bags under her eyes might be.

Gideon, bleeding heart that he is and utterly lacking any sense of self preservation, chooses then to chime in. “You’re not worried about him him at all? What if he passed out in an alley somewhere or got mugged and left for dead?”

The glare she casts him does curdle the milk in his coffee.

“I could only be so lucky.”

“S’too nois’y.” Chandra groans from her seat between them but doesn’t lift her head or her arms up from the table top.

Gideon tries to pat down one of the many crooked curls of her uncombed hair sticking up from between her crossed arms, but she only grumbles again and hunches her shoulders up further.

He’s apparently quite a bit more of an idiot than Liliana already thought because he tries and, it goes without saying, fails to level an accusatory look across the table at her.

“Don’t give me that look Hercules… “ She turns her face back into the comforting steam wafting up from her mercifully black coffee but deigns to flick her wrist in his direction. “She did that all on her own. I didn’t do a thing to her. Didn’t even get the chance.”

Is the bitterness obvious in her voice?

She hopes it’s obvious in her voice.

And of course because the multiverse is truly working against her this morning because Nissa and Tamiyo pick then to to come down the stairs and and take their seats. Nissa, predictably, with all the peppy spring in her step of someone who had missed the window to join their compatriots in the gratuitous over consumption of alcohol.

And Tamiyo…

Liliana blinked.

How the nine hells was Tamiyo even standing this morning?

She seems to have just as much trouble functioning and facing the bright light of day as the elf she’s come in with, which is to say none at all. Jace’s illusion has worn off and she is once again the milk while soratami she had been before their ill advised libations. The inn keeper doesn’t even bat an eye, he barely seems to care or notice the strangeness of their party any longer.

The table where they are seated isn’t nearly far away enough from the entrance to give Liliana a chance to process their arrival. Not that there were many, any, other patrons in the tap room this early to blend in with.

“Good Morning!” Nissa chimes, unaware apparently, of the manner in which this particular morning was wholly and unequivocally not ‘good’ in any way.

Gideon manages a “Morning” with something that might have been an attempt at a smile. Chandra mumbles something into the table top. Liliana just glowers at her.

Both sit down undeterred.

Liliana takes solace in the fact that, once Nissa is done adding more milk than coffee into the beverage she’d already liberally honeyed at the outset and finally takes a demure sip, her lips purse in perplexed displeasure at the taste.

Small victories.

She puts the offending drink down on the table top and glances around once more to be sure.

“Jace hasn’t gotten back yet then?”

Liliana is surprised to hear the anger that shadows her words.

“No, not yet.” Gideon answers. “Do you know where he got off too last night? We uh-” His eyes flick down to the table where he taps his fingers a few times against the wood. “Didn’t see him leave.”

Nissa looks at Tamiyo for a moment. “He left bar with someone.”

Tamiyo nods and adds, tentatively. “I believe there were… amorous intentions.”

Gideon’s eyes go wide and his brows shoot up to his hairline.

Liliana’s narrow. “A woman... or a man?”

It’s Nissa’s turn to be surprised. “A man. How did you know to ask?”

Liliana doesn’t bother to answer her question, only presses. “Really now...”

“Yes.” Nissa repeats her point stubbornly. “It was a man and he looked like Jace. I thought he was him, at first.”

Her mind jumps an uncomfortable distance and it has nothing to do with her burgeoning headache.

“Someone who looks like Jace?” Gideon asks, still confused and seeking simple explanations. “Nissa, you do have a habit of thinking that all humans look alike.”

“No.” Tamiyo turns her head slowly from side to side. “The the similarities were uncanny. They could have been brothers.”

Gideon laughed, the volume not entirely covering up the obvious uncomfort. “Wait, what? Jace left the tavern with some man to… what, sleep with him? A man that looked just like him. That’s ludicrous.”

“Not just like him, I’d wager.” Liliana cut in, her voice like a dagger and her hangover completely forgotten.

There was no way.

It’s another ten minutes or so before Jace arrives, but when he does he’s wearing the same clothes as the night before. Despite the fact that he could have illusioned himself up an entirely new set. He could have at least bothered to hide bruises on his neck, bared thoughtlessly by the cut of his shirt’s collar.

It’s clear that his mind is elsewhere. Inevitably still focused on the reason for the school boy’s smile that’s playing on and off his face as he continually fails to hide it. He couldn’t have hidden the brightness of his eyes either.

“Gods above....” Gideon says on a breathless exhale, because no doubt breathing is the last thing on any of their minds as they all turn their heads. Save for Chandra.

For once Liliana and Gideon agree on something. That can hardly bode well.

Jace at least has the presence of mind to go pink slightly pink as he nears the table. If he knew that Liliana recognized the way he was walking with just the slightest of awkwardness, the same way she’d seen him crawling back to his own room across the hall on those nights years ago, she knew he’d have skipped straight to red.

He had back then and he’s apparently been keeping to all of his other old habits.

He pulls out a chair and sits on the other side of the table from Liliana and glances around at his collected companions.

“Sorry I’m late.” He offers with a bit of a laugh. That as much as anything else makes the apology moot.

When they all stare silently back at him his eyes dart around for something one of their faces that might not be anger or annoyance with him. Tamiyo is looking at him more like he’s a very interesting puzzle she’s only just realized has an entirely new set of pieces. Which might be even more uncomfortable.

“Are we drinking tea or coffee? I’ll… uh… go get us another round.” There’s still humor in his voice even after the chilly reception and the smile only grows on his face as he stands again to step over the bar where the inn keeper is cleaning glasses. Perhaps their own mess from last night.

Liliana follows after him.

He’s just put in his order when she leans forward on the bar into his view.

Jace smiles at her, fiddling with something in his hands she thinks might be coins to pay for the drinks before she catches the glimpse of paper between his fingers.

“How did your night end up Liliana?”

She lets his eyes follow her’s to one of the more purple marks on his collar bone. “Not as well as your’s, apparently.”

“Lili-”

“Jace, it isn’t him-”

“It is.” He corrects her in almost the same breath and it comes out as hopeless and pathetically honest as she should have known it would have. “He... I can’t explain it but it is him. It’s… I don’t know how but Tamiyo was speaking last night about the infinite possibilities of the multiverse and with all that we’ve seen and all that’s happened you can’t tell me it’s impossible.”

She doesn’t know what to tell him. Instead she says the first thing that comes to mind.

“So why are you here? So out of practice you couldn’t manage another round this morning?”

The jibe doesn’t dampen his mood any.

“No. He - he had some business to attend to this morning. I saw myself out.”

“Jace…” That makes even less sense. If he’d woken up alone after being fatefully reunited across the multiverse against all odds why was he still so… Why wasn’t he off in a dark corner somewhere mind sculpting his memories away? That seemed to be his answer to every other heart break.

“He left this.” He opens up his hands, he had been holding a slip of paper after all. He finally offers her the embarrassed, sheepish smile she deserves to see after this whole experience.

She lifts the folded bit of parchment out of his palm and uncurls it to read. Gods even the handwriting is similar, to say nothing of the sappy mock-poetic word choice and the wanna-be charming drivel. It precisely the kind of thing that he would have written. But she supposed that, just maybe, it seems he has?

“He wants to see you again…” Liliana sighs, but a smile is encroaching onto the corners of her lips. “It seems his taste hasn’t improved any.”

Jace just grins wider and the blue in his eyes has never been brighter. “Lucky me.”

The two of them leave the rest of their company at the bar after the next round of coffees and teas are ready from the inn keeper. Chandra still isn’t much for plan-making or conversation so Liliana leaves a hastily scrawled note with her, tucked into the still tightly-folded refuge of her arms. The irony isn’t lost on her, but Jace knows better than to press her when she’s agreed to help him.

Once she convinces Jace to put on an illusion to make himself presentable, because really he really does look exactly like he’d left the tavern and gone cavorting all night with a lascivious swordsman, they head out onto the little main street of the town. The locals have been up and about their business for hours now. They make idle small talk and exchange the right pleasantries with shopkeepers and passersby to get the information that Jace is looking for. Truth be told Liliana is just as curious now. The more information they get that he’s real, that he hasn’t magically appeared here in the past twelve hours under mysterious circumstances and strange happenings is doing something to alleviate the tension in her chest that this entire insane situation has brought about.

She can’t shake it entirely.

Jace already told her his name was Callen Roarke, but they learn that he’s been in town for several years now, relocated from a larger township. She doesn’t need the hopeful ‘told you so’ look Jace shoots her to know that the timelines, vaguely, mesh. His ‘death’ and reappearance could all mesh on one time line. Maybe. It is all too convenient. Things like this didn’t just happen.

Not many in town seem to know him particularly well, everyone’s information is topical and esoteric. The tailor knows when Callen last purchased his new cloak, one of the farmers hawking his produce tells them that he very much enjoyed his particular sheep’s cheese.

No one has seen him today so it’s all largely useless, but it does all cement him as a real person. And Jace is giddy, riding high on it all.

It’s a long way to fall when it all comes crashing down beneath him.

There isn’t much of a warning. They’re just walking a bit farther to the end of the road, the blacksmith and general handyman he apparently visits has his forge set up there so as to spare the rest of the shops the smoke. They start their inquiries as casually as they had at each stop previously but the smith stops working immediately once they mention his name.

He douses the big iron nail he’d been shaping into the cooling trough and then sets it aside, pulls one of his charred leather gloves and wipes his meaty hand over his sweating forehead.

“You two friends of his?”

The tension that had been slowly leaching out of her but never quite left snaps back into life in her chest.

Jace doesn’t seem to notice the difference and laughs a smile onto his guileless face. “You could say that… Have you seen him then?”

“Kid…” The smith says gruffly and he glances back to the far wall of his shop where a set of tall pine boards have been laid out. “I’m sorry that I have to be one to tell you this. The militia found him, maybe an hour ago. His last job was… it went bad.”

Whatever had been holding her on edge breaks with the man’s final words.

Something in Jace breaks too: shatters.

She should have known. Liliana spells the smith silent and spirits them away.

The first time was bad enough.

She still somehow feels like this time is her fault too. And maybe she should be trusting in those feelings more. Maybe that’s why she doesn’t just leave. She lingers long enough at least to see him through the worst of the break down. To see him through the purge of the memories she knows he can’t handle living through a second time.

It’s a gruelling process.

It was always seems to when the two of them are involved.

She does manage to get him home though and with any luck that Azorius bint won’t even know he was gone.

But she doesn’t stay.

* * *

“Wow...uh, you weren’t kidding.” Chandra says around the giant smile that breaks across her face. “You really did show up.”

Liliana returns a considerably tamer version. “Of course I did. I left a note.”

Chandra chuckles and shrugs. “Gideon was skeptical.”

Liliana rolls her eyes but her lips curl a bit more. “Well, that’s reason enough to show up isn’t it? Proving Gideon wrong is quickly becoming a favorite activity of mine.”

The two women step closer on the Thraben street where they stand outside the tavern. It’s very nearly evening and a day under the sun has baked the dirt between the widely spaced cobbles to a dry dust.

Chandra chances closing the distance further and Liliana can see the blush on her round cheeks between her freckles as the young woman looks up at her. “Hopefully that’s not only reason.”

“Of course not.” Liliana brings a hand up and brushes her thumb over a few of those freckles. “Gideon isn’t that interesting.”

Chandra seems relieved and she chuckles out a few notes of self deprecating laughter. “I made such an ass out of myself last night…”

Liliana joins in, to reassure her if nothing else, but she does take a step back. “We all make mistakes.”

Maybe she’s getting a bit sardonic in her ‘old age.’

“I do have something I have to take care of before…” She gives Chandra an obvious up-and-down with her eyes to make her point. “Anything else.”

“Sure.” Chandra nods, the blush crawling higher over the apples of her cheeks. She very well might have agreed to anything that Liliana said. “Can… Can I just tag along?”

She hadn’t been expecting that, though maybe she should have.

Liliana sighed and pushed her shoulders into a mild shrug. “It’s just a bit of necromancer business, but I suppose there’s no harm in it.”

There’s no reason to believe that she’ll find anything worthwhile anyway, but there’s still something that’s nagging at her all the same. And it’s the least she can do for an old friend.

Getting a bit soft too...

Chandra follows after her as she asks about town for the bits of information she’s missing. The younger woman makes only idle commentary, half the time to herself, and doesn’t get in her way or step on her toes and Liliana finds herself both surprised and grateful. Eventually she gets the answer out of the militiamen who had found the body and she adds ‘impressed’ to her earlier list when Chandra is waiting for her outside of the barracks with a saddled bay mare.

“I thought it might be quicker if we had a ride? And I had some extra money to burn since Gideon ended up paying my bar tab last night.”

Liliana could have kissed her.

She does before she lifts herself into the saddle.

It wouldn’t have been a terribly long walk, but it’s only an hour’s ride astride their mount. The horse isn’t fast but she’s sturdy and steady. Liliana pulls them to a stop when she can feel the pull of death nearby. They dismount and Chandra loops the reigns over a low tree branch before she follows Liliana into the woods.

It doesn’t take long. There’s a clearing where it happened, Liliana doesn’t need any of her magic to see the dark stains of blood on the moss and undergrowth. Odd that his attacker came upon him in such a notably open space, the usual forest denizens of Innistrad would be perfectly capable of snatching up even a competent human from the thickest of forest paths.

She turns her attention to one of the trees at the outer edge that looks like it took the brunt of some over-reaching attacks. They could be claw marks, almost. But there are only three of them and they seem to be in no pattern or articulated shape that she can place to a known creature. Not even one of the strange abominations Emrakul’s presence had created.

Liliana traces her fingers over them. They are exceptionally clean. Not claw marks at all perhaps, some kind of weapon then? Steel or some other manner of metal. Peculiar.

Perhaps she should have simply stolen the body and reanimated it for her answers, local Thraben militia be damned. That could always be plan ‘B’ if she couldn’t get answers this way...

“Liliana?” Chandra’s kneeling down at the other side of the clearing. She raises up what seemed to be part of a blade.

She leaves the tree and its… whatever… marks.

“Looks like it’s from a sword.” Chandra offers the piece to her. “Too broad to be from a dagger, I’d think. This a damn clean break. There’s no wear or fracture on the steel at all. Like someone just snapped it.”

She nods, she’s in agreement with the assessment. Something that could snap a sword into pieces, and the blacksmith in town had seemed to know his trade, as well as slice through the bark and hardwood of an old-forest tree.

Liliana closes her eyes and shakes her head. Something strange is clouding at the corners of her mind, some strange power in the air around them that she doesn’t quite know. It doesn’t block or hinder her magic, quite the opposite, but it reacts and pulls with it in odd ways. Nothing from Innistrad.

“What could have broken this?” She muses aloud for lack of answers.

Once again, Chandra earns an unexpected swell of admiration as she holds another shimmering bit of silver metal aloft. “I found something else. It got flung a little farther off this way.”

When she holds out this piece out she adds “This is different, this isn’t anything from Innistrad, is it?”

The form, the curve of the piece is too natural, too organic to have been formed by the most talented of even the Markov family’s artisan smiths. It only takes Liliana a glance to respond.

“No.”

She knows etherium when she sees it.

Her eyes go dark.

Her mind jumps to one conclusion. It’s purely circumstantial, but if one old face could reemerge from the blind eternities… why not another?

She knows for certain it’s too much of a coincidence.

She doesn’t like it.

When she looks up from their hands to Chandra, the other woman’s eyes have gone unfocused and she’s looking off above them, as if she’s searching the air for answers. Or she’s a hound with a scent.

Liliana waits a beat, then another.

Then Chandra’s eyes go wide.

“This is aether. There’s aether here.” She seems torn between confusion and glee at the familiarity. “There wasn’t any that I could feel like this anywhere else in Innistrad. This is… this is like back at home in Aradara, or the Ghirapur markets!”

“Home?” Liliana asks, and her pulse quickens.

“Kaladesh. Someone’s been Planeswalking between Kaladesh and Innistrad and the aether energy’s followed them.” Chandra explains and she seems caught up in the mystery herself, or maybe she’s just invigorated by the strange, almost primal energy in the air.

Liliana smiles.

There’s a darkness to it that Chandra knows must be the reason behind this entire excursion.

She’s right of course.

Liliana herself isn’t the cause of the sinister shift of events that has just reared its head. But she’s seen before and she will not let it escape her. Not when she knows where she can find it again.

It’s the least she can do for an old friend.

A shine in her eyes glints through the shadow that has crept up in them and festered. “You did mention that you wanted to show me the markets there… Do you remember that from last night?”

Chandra tries to laugh, but it comes off more than a little uncomfortable with the spaces in Liliana’s internal narrative she can’t fill. “Yeah, I remember.”

“I think now would be a good time.”

And old friend indeed.

**Author's Note:**

> This entire thing started out as a happy femslash Chandra/Liliana dream: happy and innocent and fluff-filled as anything involving Liliana could be... Then my subconscious decided that it would be a far better dream if Jace could only hate himself even more and threw Kallist in. Or a version of him. Or something. Naturally I woke up (read: loud neighbors woke me up) JUST when things took a hard left turn into drama angst land. Obviously I had to finish my insane dream somehow and this was the best possible way. Surely. When I realized I could tie things into the Kaladesh story line, I was pretty much sold on finishing this entire frankenfic.
> 
> I do hope you've all enjoyed this dose of Jace's continuing downward spiral. I do so enjoy writing this boy hating himself.


End file.
